


in the dark fields

by Gildedstorm



Category: Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: The Old Republic (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, old republic era cold war in the bg, so many original characters, so much research from wookiepedia, tfw farming is actually an excellent outlet for murderous rage
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:34:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,127
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24646519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gildedstorm/pseuds/Gildedstorm
Summary: Following an assassination attempt, Sith Lord Tashram crashes onto a nowhere planet in the Outer Rim. Letting her enemies think she was killed is the easy part - the trouble is what comes after.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 13





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> my history of actually finishing anything multichaptered ever is very poor and yet. here we are! I've been planning out bits and pieces of my "sith farmer" story for a while, and finally did enough poking into setting details to start on it

Dying. Something around her is dying.

Tashram reaches out to it with all the thirst of a wanderer in the desert. Is she dying, too? Maybe, maybe – the little she allows herself to notice is all pain, a dozen layers of it all seeping together. But beneath and beyond herself is the pain of a thousand, tens of thousands of tiny lives. Plantlife, surely, but right now all she cares about is that they are dying first. She does not have the strength to lift her head or move her hands, but she does not let even one death slip through her grasp.

Each one alone is not even a spark of warmth, but together they are barely enough, a flicker of energy. Tashram uses it to open her eyes, and they immediately blur and water. The air is all smoke, acrid and foul, and she coughs on her first few breaths.

Her ship – yes, this was her ship, this cage of metal warped from the heat and collapsed inward from the crash. There is metal above her, and burnt ground beneath. The heat presses down on her, as potent and unassailable as the grip of an enemy. She has to move. If the fire reaches the fuel tank, no amount of power will be enough to save her. Her hands curl in the dirt.

Moving is terrible. Either new wounds open as she drags herself forward, or older ones reacquaint themselves. She does not have the strength to avoid the twisted pieces of metal and shards of the windshield and they bite and drag and scrape as she crawls over them. They don’t matter. She is Sith, the pain can fuel her for a little while at least, and there are shards everywhere because there is an opening in the wreckage. After an endless moment she heaves herself through, clutching at the scorched earth. The heat is still rolling out, blackening what little she can see beyond the crashsite. A field of long grass, she thinks, though much of it has been flattened.

She was half-thrown from the cockpit. If she had not had contact with the ground, with the charred soil and the burning grass –

No use thinking about that.

She must keep moving, but she can’t. Tashram soaks in what little life there is left around her, but it is a frail trickle. She clings to it and to rough awareness of the ever-present heat, the ugly crackling of the fire as it eats away behind her, the crunch of footsteps in the distance.

The footsteps come closer, stop.

“Count on a Sith to almost make it out,” a low voice says. “They can’t just show up and get killed like everyone else.”

“It’s in that code of theirs. To be Sith you must be a huge fucking pain in the ass to everyone in the galaxy.”

“Even your assassins,” the first says.

“ _Especially_ your assassins. It’s like those stars-damned slugs they’ve got. You shoot a hole in it and it crawls off to try to bite you in the foot later –”

They laugh. They are so close Tashram can feel them, vibrant and full of life and deadly. One must be standing right beside her, because their boot nudges her. She is too tired for anger at their mockery, too tired even for deception. The boot hits again to roll her over, and she goes with it, grasping blindly for their leg.

Her fingers brush past, and she pours all her bruised, burning focus into the bounty hunter’s living body and _pulls_.

A strangled sound as he tries to breathe, but she takes that too – the air from their lungs, the blood from their veins, the panicked flutter of  their heart under her hand. She drinks it all, even as  the other one shouts. Blasterfire is just another pain on top of the rest, and she does not try to defend herself or avoid it or heal, just reaches out.  Her power is slow, so slow, but draining one life gives her the energy to course it through the air and into the other hunter and then it is too late. She is a deep chasm carved from pain and struggle and  she drains them both  down  to their bones.

When they are both silent, and she can breathe a little easier, Tashram drags their bodies closer to the ship. The flames lick at her with greedy appetite – if there’s anything left of the corpses, it won’t be enough to be recognizable.

They must have a ship somewhere nearby. She picks a direction amidst the long, tossing grasses and wide-spreading trees in the distance and goes to look.

Between her pained, halting pace and the fits of coughing that catch her, she does not get very far. More than once she thinks of draining the life of everything around her – but what surer way to give herself away? Other hunters might come. She must travel to a safe place, go to ground and recover her strength in time.

Drawing back from the Force goes against her every instinct, and without it she feels unmoored, half-blind. She stumbles on, and there is still no sign of a ship or a landing site.

But eventually she hears the rattling drone of a speeder engine, which cuts off a good distance away. Tashram stops, taking the opportunity to cough and clear her throat. At least she does not need to work at looking weak and helpless – she is already close to that.

The stranger wades through the grass towards her, stopping far out of arm’s reach. From afar they were curiously indistinct, and now she sees why – they are a Selonian, fur dangerously close to blending in with the dull colours around them. She has only ever seen a few, and none outside of the Corellian system.

They study her for a moment, and then look past her, to the plume of smoke still starkly visible. “That your ship?” Their voice is a rough burr.

“It was,” she says, stupidly obvious. “I crashed.” Everything she has ever learned fights back against opening her mouth and asking for help. No Sith Lord would stoop so low. No _alien_ Sith would dare, not with every rival and student circling and waiting for a chance to prove her weak and unfit for the power she wields. So Tashram chokes on the words, and cannot get them out.

The Selonian does not wait for them. “Any others with you?”

“No.” She thinks of the bodies, reconsiders. “They’re... dead, now. Where is the spaceport? I – I need a ship.”

“No ships in the spaceport right now.”

“No _ships?_ ” She laughs, incredulous and strained beyond belief. “Where _is_ this?”

“Kwevron,” the Selonian says, and shrugs when she stares at them. “It’s quiet. I’m Kzittal.”

Her only hope is still the hunters’ ship, if she can just _find_ it. She turns aside, swaying. Suddenly the Selonian is in her way, leaning on a staff. She should have caught them moving, or noticed the weapon –

“No ships that way,” they say, unruffled by how she startles back. “And if there were, you’re too banged up to fly. Den’s not too far. Go there, rest, get fixed up. Then we speak of ships. Good idea, yes?”

Tashram thinks that even if she were to turn away and refuse, the Selonian would drag her there anyways. Their certainty is not quite a threat. “Yes,” she manages, and looks for any sign of satisfaction or triumph. They show none, and do not move to help her when she insists on limping the short distance to their speeder on her own fast-fading strength.

It is not a victory at all, but she holds it close to her heart all the same.


	2. Chapter 2

Kwevron, Tashram soon finds out, does not have a medbay, or even a dedicated medical _droid_. Kzittal promises her there is a good store of kolto sprays at the den, but what she remembers of arriving and being treated is a dream stretching on for too long – waking to pain in the dark, surrounded by gleaming eyes. Somehow, she keeps her resolve to not draw on the Force, in case her enemy is searching for her, and so she is weak instead, racked with fever and unable to walk more than a few steps.

When she is clearheaded enough, she rages at her weakness, and nurses that bitter anger as her sole comfort. The hunters’ ship looms large in her mind. If she could only go out and find it, before anyone else does. Before they are tracked back to this planet, and to her....

But she can’t even make it out of the den on her own power, and she cannot simply ask if another ship was found, and risk the attention it would draw. So day by day she seethes, and heals.

“You look better,” Kzittal says, peeling off the poultice on the worst of her burns. Today she can sit up on her own, and as small as it is, not having to rely totally upon a stranger is an immense relief.

Tashram reminds herself that she is still stuck here, utterly at the mercy of her and her tribe – apparently all sisters, which she still cannot make sense of – but the relief remains, contrary to all facts.

“Not well enough,” she says, biting her cheek to keep from wincing as Kzittal dabs at her side with a rank-smelling salve. “It would go faster with more kolto.”

“And use all of it on an outsider? We cannot order more for many months.” For all that she grubs in the dirt on a backwater planet, Kzittal seems more impassive to her than most Jedi. Her fur masks her expression, and her ears don’t even twitch as she speaks. “I would be cast out for that foolishness. You beside me, of course. Is quick health worth that?”

Tashram lets out her breath in a hiss, not even sure herself if it is from pain or rage. If limited resources were such a problem, they should have thought more about settling here in the _first place_. But she waits until she can be sure she will not say anything to put her life at risk.

“It could be.”

“It could,” Kzittal allows, stepping back to look at her searchingly. “But not an offer you should make now. Not one I will take.”

“Don’t be stupid,” she snaps. “I have technology, weapons, things this planet has never seen – surely if not that, you need _credits_.” Unbidden, she thinks of the bounty that had been placed upon her. It had to have been quite a sum to draw that much attention. Better that Kzittal not ever learn of it.

“Are any here?” Kzittal asks, ignoring the heat in her voice. Tashram would give _anything_ to make her react somehow, make her see she is worthy of respect and fear. “What use to me or my sett are promises? Any outlander can promise as much.”

“I wouldn’t _lie_.” If only because needless treachery is usually more trouble than it is worth. The Selonian shrugs a shoulder, unconcerned with this. Tashram struggles to find her way back to composure, the Force a lure she cannot draw upon. A quick display of power would solve everything, or close to it.

But she can’t risk it. It hasn’t even been a month since the crash. Whoever had ordered her death could wait, especially since her body had not turned up.

She takes a deep breath that jars her ribs unpleasantly. “Then what _do_ you want?”

Seeming to take that as a sign that the discussion is mostly over with, Kzittal moves back in to apply a fresh poultice. “Good yields for the crops,” she says, voice even. “Getting grazing permissions for the year from the neighbours. No sickness, no blight. Not things you can grant, yes?”

Tashram curls her lip, looking away. Small concerns, fit for a small and petty world.

“And to see you well, and away from here. Which you _can_ give, if you wait.”

She chews on that for a long moment, hating that she must let herself be tended to, that she is so easily and effectively cornered. She cannot risk drawing attention, so she cannot use the Force. She cannot use the Force, so she cannot heal herself or commandeer a shuttle from the locals. She cannot heal on her own power, and so must wait on Kzittal’s mercy....

“It’s not as if I have a choice.”

“Hm,” Kzittal says to that, and finishes bandaging her injuries in silence. When she leaves, Tashram stares into the waiting dark, hot-eyed and teeth gritted against words she must not say.


End file.
